Caro Speaks to the Spirit of Jane Jacobs

One of New York City’s best rivalries — Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs — was briefly and eloquently put into perspective on Monday night at an awards ceremony hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mr. Moses was the master builder, the champion of large-scale urban planning who shaped the city for good or ill by obliterating neighborhoods to make way for bridges, expressways and public housing projects.

Ms. Jacobs was the master neighborhood preserver who helped change the way people think about cities and the streets they live on. Mr. Moses and Ms. Jacobs remain urban planning’s David and Goliath, after Ms. Jacobs in the late 1960s took on and defeated Mr. Moses over plans to build an expressway that would have sliced through Lower Manhattan.

At an event honoring the recipients of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal, Robert A. Caro, the author of “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” spoke of meeting Ms. Jacobs only once, years ago. All they ended up talking about was Mr. Moses.

“He didn’t like either one of us very much,” Mr. Caro told the audience at the Morgan Library and Museum at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street. He added: “It turns out we each had a question that we wanted to ask the other. Jane wanted to ask me what it was like to meet him. I wanted to ask her what it was like to beat him.”

The foundation created the Jane Jacobs Medal in 2007. This year’s winners, who were honored for upholding the needs of living communities in the urban environment, were Peggy Shepard, executive director and co-founder of West Harlem Environmental Action, and Alexie M. Torres-Fleming, executive director of the South Bronx-based Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. Along with the medal, they will receive $100,000 each.

Before her death in 2006 at age 89, Ms. Jacobs had told interviewers about the day she saw Mr. Moses at a city hearing and heard him dismiss opponents of the Lower Manhattan Expressway as “nothing but a bunch of mothers.”

Ms. Torres-Fleming said she loves that quotation. “That’s my badge of honor,” she said shortly before the awards were given out. “That’s who I am. I’m a mother.”

Robert Moses understanding political and economic power of words enabled emotionally charged expressions such as urban renewal and slum clearance to destroy New York as an affordable place for ordinary people to live.

With so many public projects constantly stalled (i.e. World Trade Center site, Second Avenue Subway, Javits Center extension, and so on and so on) it would be nice to have a Robert Moses around now to actually get things done!

Let us not forget the disgraceful role of the Times in proselytizing for all of Moses’s most destructive and reactionary schemes, including, but not limited to, the Lower Manhattan Expressway referred to above.

Jane Jacobs may have “won” her battle against Robert Moses, but in the process she helped to compound the smog, congestion, and noise problems from street traffic that would have been diverted had Moses had his way. In fact, Manhattanites have Jane Jacobs to blame for the traffic congestion around the Holland, Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels.

Had Robert Moses been allowed to build the expressways he’d planned across Manhattan (as well as the Cross-Sound Bridge, street traffic through NYC (especially Queens and Manhattan) could have been reduced by as much as 25 – 35 percent, with a commensurate reduction in emissions, noise, and congestion. In addition, traffic within the city would move more rapidly (or less slowly, as it were), increasing efficiency of delivery and service operations, and generally just making it easier to get around the city.

Instead, thanks to Jane Jacobs and other wackos who oppose anything that doesn’t grow out of the dirt, we have the present nightmare. Driving through this city, never mind in it, is a horror akin to one of Dante’s circles.

Every urban area I’ve ever visited, at home or abroad, has had beltways or bypasses to allow thru traffic to avoid adding to the congestion of the cities themselves. Only in New York have I come across Interstate highways that unceremoniously dump traffic onto city streets. Don’t blame Moses for this; he wanted to fix the problem.

I wish the author tied in the Jane Jacobs’ thinking with the area at issue. Was her notion that stopping the roadway would preserve a mixed use community in SoHo? Did it? I see SoHo today as an extremely upscale urban mall. Am I missing something? Is there a mixing of socieconomic residents in this area. If so, I’ve certainly missed it. What I do see are miles of cars inching along Canal Street as residents of New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens and L.I. spend their Saturday and Sunday afternoons honking at each other rather than with their families and friends, as their trips are interminably prolonged, both to their detriment and to the detriment of those living and going about their business in lower Manhattan. All so that Prada and Apple can have sleek stores near Houston Street? Thanks Jane.

I haven’t driven through Manhattan in years, which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that my territory includes Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties; all of New Jersey; and Philadelphia and its suburbs.

I’ve become quite adept at avoiding Manhattan, even though doing so adds thousands of miles to my annual driving. I suspect I’m not alone in this, so let’s add the millions of miles collectively driven by drivers to avoid NYC (as well as the resulting smog and fuel waste from all that circuitous driving) to Jane Jacobs’ legacy.

As for your typical Manhattanite suggestions of public transportation, walking, bike riding, and so forth: You may be surprised to learn this, but there are many, many people whose professions require them to carry more than a briefcase, an iPod, and an inflated Manhattan ego to work with them. No one in his or her right mind drives in (or through) Manhattan by choice.

You can walk under the expressways Moses created in Bklyn, Bx and Queens if you want an idea of the dirt, grit and emptiness a cross-manhattan expressway would have added to the street life of the areas it would have covered. Maybe other countries do it better, I don’t know, but space under expressways is a dead zone.

Not sure if you read the Power Broker, but it mentions a principle that is known to all transportation planners – build it and they will come. Auto use – or demand if prefer an economic analogy – always rises to meet the supply of roads. There will always be congestion in New York, no matter how many roads are built, because there are so many people. Think, only half of New Yorkers own cars. If more expressways are built, people will start to drive more because of the initial speed that is offered by having greater capacity. Soon, all those additional drivers seeking speedier transportation have clogged the roads and the level of congestion is where it was before.

The only effective solution is greater investment in mass transit/ and or something like congestion pricing, to make driving more expensive. This is just a fact. Not really up for debate. You can see the lesson repeated throughout the nation and the world. Go to Beijing, check out all the new ring roads (there are five) circling the city. They are all packed.

Liberty Lover, every day as I bike through SoHo and the Village on my way to work, or bike along the river to take my son to baseball practice, or walk with my daughter to school in Gramercy Park, I am reminded of how lucky we are that the Jacobsian vision was on balance the winner (although much could be improved), and how people like you and Robert Moses who hate all things urban (walking, cycling, storefronts, sidewalks, cafes, boutiques, corner pubs, etc.), have been relegated to the other 99% of the USA living behind your windshield complaining about traffic on your way to the strip mall with the 25 acres of parking lots. Enjoy it out there, but don’t come around here and try to take away the only decent city we have left.

Ever hear of induced demand? You can’t build your way out of congestion; it just attracts more auto traffic. Congestion ends up being no better; even the increase in throughput is only marginal. Witness, e.g., Atlanta, Los Angeles, Long Island, the SF Bay area… the list goes on and on.

‘course, if you’d actually read Caro you’d know this already. I say cities for people, not for cars. The provincial windshield perspective does nobody any good.

Moses made all 5 Boros into one city with his projects. It didn’t take him decades to finish his work. Today planners and builders are held up for years by reams of red tape and countless boards and approvals to get. That is why no transportation project of consequence has been built since Moses left the stage.

“Induced Demand”? You guys should call the MTA! They are building an entire new second avenue subway parallel to the existing Lex. line to relieve congestion on that line! What fools! Don’t they realize that the new line will simply “induce demand” and thus do nothing to relieve overcrowding on the Lex line! I’d question that logic, but apparently the theory is “not open to debate”.

Well said, Zach. Caro (and others) make clear that cities thrive on balanced interests and that roads only become a problem when there are no other options. As for other urban areas, well, feel free to head to Cincinnati and make use of the wonderful bypasses and beltways that make it a splendid city to drive in — if only there were a reason to do so.

Oh, “Liberty Lover”… we already have a few beltways in this great City, don’t we? We have a West Side Highway, and a Harlem River Drive, and an FDR, all around Manhattan Island, which is what you wanted.. right?

That doesn’t make you happy? Okay, we also have a Major Deegan, a BQE, and a Cross-Bronx Expressway, a Bruckner Expressway, 495… Oh, and a Belt Parkway. I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface… Van Wyck, Gowanus… I gotta stop.

Is that what you love and call “Liberty”? Is that not enough? It’s plenty constricting for this New Yorker.

If you like driving in other cities, perhaps you should pack up and move. You might like Brasilia.

And for the smokedgouda, that must be some really excellent cheese you are smoking… How can I get some? What exactly is so bothersome about a community of residents having a democratic voice on what gets removed and built over in a given area? Or have you been thwarted one too many times in some quest to seize control over an area at the expense of other fellow citizens?

Try the locally produced organic full fat ricotta. You’ll feel much better.

The notion that neighborhoods “bisected” by highways become blighted by the highways is simply silly. Is the Upper East Side blighted by the FDR? Try affording a house in Bayside, Queens. Bayside is cut by the LIE east-west, by the Clearview north-south and ringed by the Cross Island Parkway. Bayside is probably the most desirable neighborhood in Queens. Compare that with East New York, Brooklyn which has nary a highway in sight and is a much less desirable area. You guys see decades of inept economic policy and counterproductive welfare dependency in the Bronx and shout “highway!” as your excuse for the inevitable bad social outcomes. I-95 goes from Miami to Maine, the notion that it created 2,000 miles of blight runs counter to the observations of anyone who has traversed it. The same road that runs through the Bronx also runs through Mamaroneck.

Yes, I’ve read Caro’s The Power Broker, as well as Moses’ rebuttal and his own autobiography, along with thousands of original documents, in the course of my own research for a book I’m writing about Moses. Your point is?

And yes, I know about induced demand, Matt. It is true, but only to a point. There is a point at which the supply of asphalt can meet, and actually exceed demand, if roads are designed and built by forward-looking engineers with adequate foresight.

If you’d spent as much time as I have driving across this country for the past four decades, you’d realize that there are many cities in this great land where expressways really are expressways, and where traffic jams are the exception rather than the rule. To achieve this, however, requires that roads be built to exceed maximum usage expectations, which is rarely the case in New York, where the simple act of painting a stripe down the center of a road is enough to rally the masses against it.

But what, exactly, does any of that have to do with the sheer idiocy of terminating Interstate highways in the middle of a congested city, rather than building a bypass? This is what we are talking about, isn’t it? Our heroine, Jane Jacobs, succeeded in guaranteeing that every car, bus, and train passing between New Jersey and points east would have to stop and crawl through the streets of Manhattan on the way.

Vehicle-hating Manhattanites often fail to comprehend that a good percentage of the hated vehicles on their streets are driven by people who would gladly give one of any body part they have two of to be anywhere else but in Manhattan. Not everyone loves your fortress enclave as much as you do. Many drivers are bound elsewhere and see Manhattan as merely an obstacle blocking their paths.

Furthermore, many of these drivers are not “regulars,” but out-of-town truckers, vacationers, and other hapless souls who are unfamiliar with the city and silly enough to believe that an Interstate highway will remain, well, a highway, for its entire length. That’s pretty much the case everywhere else in the country; and you really can’t blame these folks for not knowing who the hell Jane Jacobs (nor even Robert Moses, for that matter) was, much less why they’re suddenly stuck in city traffic fending off a squeegee man and a bottled water hawker rather than on a proper highway.

Folks like me who were born here know ways around Manhattan and we use that knowledge to avoid the whole “Manhattan Experience,” which I enjoy about as much as root canal. We see nothing odd about traveling North to get to a destination that lies South, because we know that driving an extra ten or fifteen miles through Westchester, Rockland and Bergen counties is a small price to pay to avoid your miserable island. But to expect out-of-town drivers to know this, especially in the age of the GPS, is unreasonable.

What Robert Moses wanted to do was what any sensible road builder would do: He wanted to provide an expressway (actually two of them) to divert Interstate traffic from city streets. Nothing more, nothing less. He just wanted to build a road.

If you want to demonize the man, then read Caro’s book. You’ll find plenty of reasons to hate him. But wanting to build a road to allow Interstate traffic to bypass city streets isn’t one of them.

“With so many public projects constantly stalled (i.e. World Trade Center site, Second Avenue Subway, Javits Center extension, and so on and so on) it would be nice to have a Robert Moses around now to actually get things done!” Ariel

Virtually all of the stalled major projects share the same thread: lack of funding – public or private. Even Robert Moses can’t do squat without money.

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